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Updated: May 19, 2025
Well armed, splendidly mounted, they assume a semi-military discipline. The Mexicans are none too friendly. Valois has abundant gold, as well as forty thousand dollars in drafts on Havana, the proceeds of Lagunitas' future returns advanced by Hardin. Twenty days' march up the Yaqui Valley, through Arispe, where the filibusters died with Spartan bravery, is a weary jaunt.
Indeed it was said, that already more than fifty determined men from all parts of Sonora had assembled at the Presidio of Tubac on the Indian frontier the place appointed for the rendezvous of the expedition. It was further affirmed that in a few days Don Estevan himself would leave Arispe to place himself at their head.
When they were seated in the saloon Diaz began the conversation. "We have heard," said he, "of an expedition being got up at Arispe to proceed to Apacheria; and this gentleman and I are on our way to take part in it. Your hacienda, Senor Don Augustin, chanced to lie in our way, and we have entered to ask your permission to lodge here for the night.
"The Senor Tragaduros y Despilfarro, will find the shade of one of these cottages more agreeable," interposed Cuchillo, who knew the senator of Arispe. He knew, moreover, that the latter had attached himself to the fortunes of Don Estevan, in default of better cause: and in hopes of repairing his own fortune, long since dissipated.
A few seconds intervened, and then upon one of the roads that leading to Arispe the horseman was perceived coming on at a slow and cautious pace. On perceiving the traveller, still half reclining upon his serape, the horseman drew his rein still tighter and halted, and the two men remained for some seconds regarding each other with a fixed and interrogative glance.
The white element on the ranch worked almost unceasingly, stirring the Mexicans to the greatest effort. The middle of June passed without a drop of rain, but on the morning of the twentieth, after working all night, as Pasquale Arispe and I were drawing water from a well on the border of the encinal I felt a breeze spring up, that started the windmill.
The old ranchero and our segundo, together with Dan Happersett, made up a good set of judges on our special fitness for the different contests, and we were finally picked in this order: Enrique Lopez was to rope; Pasquale Arispe was to ride; to Theodore Quayle fell the chance of handling the lance, while I, being young and nimble on my feet, was decided on as the rider in the ten-mile relay race.
Whoever he might be, his courteous manner a l'Espagnol, his generosity, and his fine free table, soon gave him a powerful influence in the social world of Arispe; and by this influence he was now organising an expedition, to penetrate to a part of the country which it was supposed no white man had ever yet visited.
At the time of which I am writing that is, in 1830 just twenty-two years after the tragedy of Elanchovi, one of these expeditions was being organised at Arispe then the capital of the State of Sonora. The man who was to be the leader of the expedition was not a native of Mexico, but a stranger.
He was a Spaniard who had arrived in Sonora but two months before, and who was known by the name, Don Estevan de Arechiza. No one in Arispe remembered ever to have seen him; and yet he appeared to have been in the country before this time.
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